Painting: Grand Pop Moses

Setting out to paint quaint, cozy, often
whimsical realism hardly seems the way to win the avantgarde. Yet such
is precisely the goal of a Tennessee-born artist named Charles Grooms.
"I'm really oldfashioned, basically," he says, and his pursuit of
everyday images has already earned him, at the age of 27, a reputation
as the new Grand Pop Moses.

Primitive in manner and thickly impastoed, Grooms's paintings are
nostalgic vignettes of ordinary life. In a show of 36 works, which
opened in Manhattan's Tibor de Nagy gallery last week, he proves an...